Many consumers utilize a telephone to interface with an automated interactive telecommunications service system (AITSS) to get information, pay bills and gain access to various services. AITSS's are called many things such as menu driven phone systems, automated operators, automated tellers, and virtual operators. AITSS's are ubiquitous and can provide services to many industries such as the banking, shopping, travel, marketing, polling gaming and stock market industry. Accordingly AITSS's, or automated systems for short, can perform many tasks such as facilitating payments, making money transfers, providing balance information, making reservations, and facilitating the purchase of goods. Often consumers will call the same service provider every month to accomplish a task. In this case, an automated service user will repeatedly key in the same information, albeit on weekly or monthly intervals. After a user dials a ten digit number, an automated system can accept user input in the form of dual tone multi-frequency inputs. A reply to such inputs and interaction with an automated system could be described as follows;
1) Press 1 for English. Marke Numero Dos Para Espanol
2) <User Presses 1>
3) For residential accounts, press 1. For commercial accounts, press 2.
4) <User Presses 1>
5) For billing questions, press 1. To hear the current status of your account, press 2. To pay current bill, press 3. To speak to a customer service representative, press 4.
6) <User Presses 3>
7) Press 1 if you know your account number. Otherwise press 2.
8) <User Presses 1>
9) Please enter your account number, followed by the pound sign.
10) <User Enters Acct # possibly sixteen keystrokes>
11) Your current balance is $50, due on May 5, 2007. Press 1 to pay by check. Press 2 to pay by credit card.
12) <User Presses 2>
13) Please enter your credit card number.
14) <User Enters Credit Card # usually sixteen digits>
15) Please enter your credit card expiration date.
16) <User Enter Exp. Date>
17) Your payment has been accepted. Thank you, goodbye.
It can be appreciated that over forty keystrokes are required to accomplish such a transaction. The user may need to key in the same information above every month, or even more frequently such as in bi-weekly, etc. Missing one keystroke often requires a user to start the keying process over from the beginning. Further, on a phone it can be tough to position the phone for listening to a reply, then reposition the phone such that the key pad can be seen to press a key and then return the hand set to the user's ear such that the next command can be heard. Such a process can be very time consuming when many keystrokes must be entered. It would be beneficial if there were arrangements that can eliminate having to repeatedly key in the same information when interacting with an automated system.